Teaching Teaching in Spring 2012

Last week we wrapped up Teaching Teaching for the fall semester. It was a good review of content we had covered in the very first go around. We’ve since decided to make it a regularly occurring event, so I’ve been thinking about different types of content, different types of presentations, and new ways of sharing out what we’re doing. We have big plans, and I’m looking forward to future iterations!

NC-LITe

First up, not specifically focused on WFU, but very relevant for those who teach, NC-LITe will be meeting after the break.

The twice-annual meeting of NC librarians interested in educational technology and instruction will be at WFU on January 6th. Please let us know if you’d like to attend (and if you have something you’d like to share)!

Of course, we’re open to suggestions if you’d like to make sure we do anything in particular.

We’re currently working on topics relating to Teach Better Tomorrow: Sharing Quick Tips for Library Instruction & Instructional Technology, though as always, if you have something to share that doesn’t fit that category, we can still make sure you have the opportunity to share.

Book Club: The Shallows

Next, we’re going to have a discussion of a book for those who want to play along with a little winter reading. From the email announcement:

At our last Teaching Teaching, we got sidetracked a bit discussing The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains. Roz could vouch for the speediness and interestingness of the read, and we all thought that this book would help us understand our students better. We also thought that this book in particular would be interesting to read as librarians: people who help our users find specific points of data as well as navigate the context of the information they need.

So, several of us are planning to read it over the break and get together before classes start to discuss over a warm cup of Starbucks. If you’d like to join us, here’s the plan:

We might not take the full 2 hours, but I didn’t want to underestimate the time we’d want to have.

If you’d like to find the book, here it is on Worldcat, Amazon, and Barnes & Noble. You’re welcome to come without reading it ahead of time as well.

Teaching Strategies (proper)

Next semester we’re going to change the time to 10am to make it easier for more people to attend. We’ll continue meeting in 476.I’ll post the schedule as soon as it’s finalized, but after talking with many of the regular Teaching Teaching participants (and especially after a good conversation with Joy), we’ve come up with a format that should be really useful and interesting for this iteration.

The plan is to go through the topics we cover in LIB100 throughout the entire semester. For example, on the first day, we’ll talk about how people structure their course (the arc of the content, what they choose to keep and leave out, etc). Then we’ll have a day for the research process, a day for reference sources, a day for searching on the web, etc. As people have begun adapting their courses over time, we have a lot of really interesting approaches, and this will be a chance for us to find out how the class has evolved.

I’ll be looking for 2-4 people to give 5-10 minute presentations on each topic, so if you think you’re doing something that’s really useful or really unusual, please consider contacting me so that we can get you on the schedule. Otherwise, I might be contacting you.

2 Comments on ’Teaching Teaching in Spring 2012‘

Craig

Thanks for all this good work Lauren. All of us budding teachers appreciate your help so much. I am excited about the Spring TT- should be awesome!

11:01AM, 12/16/2011

Mary Beth

I’m looking forward to the “show and tell” arrangement of Teaching Teaching too! I think we can all learn so much from fellow teachers.